Voodoo Eyes by Nick Stone

horror. Death was something that happened to other people: people whose doors he knocked on to tell them their missing loved one was dead, cops who died on the job. Other people.
    The silence was stifling. It wasn’t even quiet; it was the polar opposite of noisy, a spot where sound simply didn’t exist and had no possibility of coming into being.
    He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. His throat was sealed, his tongue a concrete sculpture. His lips formed the words he thought he wanted to say like a fish drowning in air.
    Then Ashley, one of the twins, got up from her mother’s side and came over and wrapped her arms around him. She held him tightly. He bent his head to kiss the top of hers. A tear he hadn’t felt dropped from his eye into her hair. Ashley’s sister Briony joined them, hugging Max with as much force from the other side. Then Lena came over and hugged him and buried her head in his neck. And the three boys closed around them. Gradually, the people in the room added themselves to the family and things went dark around him – not a mirthless lonely dark, but a respectful one, a dipping of lights.
    He was back in time with Joe in the locker room. He remembered already being slightly awed by his partner-to-be: the way Joe had looked at Eldon, not in that deferential, ass-kissing way everyone else in the department did, but with professional suspicion and wariness, and just about enough respect to get away with it. Joe was always polite, even to racists. That was his thing, his way with people. Never get down to their level, always look down on it from several leagues up. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ to everyone. He remembered the first proper words Joe had said in the prowl car: ‘You Eldon Burns’s boy, the fighter? Don’tchu expect no special treatment from me, Punchy. In these streets, everyone hates us. We our own race out here. You dig?’ They were black and white in a town that was black or white, when it was all a big deal. Black cops didn’t trust Joe because he rolled with Max. White cops didn’t trust Max because he was learning from a black cop. Not even a badass legend like Eldon Burns could level that playing field. The divisions had made them close, the job and the shit they went through as good as welded them. He remembered times they’d got drunk and stoned, the tail they’d chased, the intimacies they’d shared. The cases they’d solved. He remembered laughing a lot. He recalled the arguments, about music and politics. Bruce Springsteen versus Curtis Mayfield. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Father, Bush the Son. They’d finally both agreed on Obama.
    And he was weeping now, safe in all that abundant, womb-like warmth, alone and in public, surrounded by more love than he’d felt in a long time. It made him feel sadder for Joe, who would never know any of this again.

9
    Max went home in the rain. A straight and steady downpour, with barely a breath of wind behind it. It was 4.30 a.m. and Washington Avenue was busy with people dashing out of clubs, jackets and handbags over heads, jumping into cars and cabs and those rent-by-the-hour, block-long white limos with blacked-out windows. Drunk and drugged-up partygoers stumbled along the sidewalk, hand in hand, shouting, screaming, singing, laughing, falling over, oblivious to the weather. A bum with a tattered umbrella was making like Fred Astaire. A man in military uniform stood to attention, saluting a flashing neon Stars and Stripes in a souvenir store. A girl in a silver dress puked her guts out while a man tenderly held the hair off her face with one hand and her shoes in the other. He guessed they were Brits. A dull, repetitive dance beat thudded away at the air, a single bass note making the raindrops on his windshield jump and run, run and jump. It sounded as if every single one of the clubs was playing the same damn song in sync, each note meshing into a kind of anthem for twenty-first-century